Last week, Obama gave another
twist to the knife in her back when his administration yet again delayed (introducing
absolutely
spurious reasoning to do so) any decision of the fate of the Keystone
XL pipeline, despite the fact every administrative review that has come
back shows scarcely any environmental impact and that it will have a substantially
positive economic impact. Landrieu
consistently has called for its approval, in tune with public opinion on
the matter in the state. Refusal to allow the northern portion to be built (the
southern one, identical in impact, already is operational) continues to negate
her campaign narrative that she deserves another term because of her “indispensability”
to the state, mocked even more now that the Democrat has assumed the
chairwomanship of the Senate Energy and
Natural Resources Committee.
Perhaps to counter that, recently
the Landrieu campaign began running
an ad featuring Donald Boysinger, a former state Republican state official
and frequent delegate to the Republican National Convention – and who has donated
to several Democrats in the past and whose family has given to Landrieu –
repeating the narrative. Of course, Bollinger’s company gets a good chunk of
its revenues from federal government orders that Landrieu no doubt can
encourage from her perch – even as the federal government seeks a judgment
against Bollinger Shipyards to recoup money for claimed substandard work.
So, yes, undoubtedly to Bollinger
and perhaps his 3,000 employees she has been “indispensable” – who seems to be
entirely unconcerned for the other 99.93 percent of the state’s inhabitants many
of whom, for example, now have become net payers to finance the Patient
Protection and Affordable Care Act, where Landrieu provided the crucial vote
for its passage and which is reviled in the state. But as long as Bollinger
gets his, he doesn’t care, and Landrieu is his meal ticket at most others’
expenses.
This was pointed out by her GOP challenger
Rep. Bill Cassidy, who called the quid pro quo illustrative of a
good-old-boy/girl system where insiders benefit and the devil take the
remainder. As a campaign tactic, this relied upon his belief that the state’s
political culture has evolved away sufficiently enough from its populist
roots of trying to control government in order to have it redistribute
resources from others to you so that people concentrate more on evaluating
candidates by policy, where he holds a decisive advantage.
Still. Cassidy and others can
expand the field of play on the influence issue to show that, even if Landrieu
votes with Obama 97 percent of the time, on those few occasions where she
asserts some kind of independence on behalf of the state she has influence over
Obama zero percent of the time. He began to move that way when the same day the
ad appeared he and other Republican members of the state’s House delegation called
upon her as committee head to move legislation that would take the pipeline
decision out of Obama’s hands.
This canny move gives Landrieu
nothing to gain and everything to lose. Unless she can get something out of the
committee in fairly short order, she can’t claim any special competence in
being able to do it, because by her own campaign rhetoric she merely is doing
what she’s supposed to be able to do, nothing more. By contrast, if she fails,
it yet again invalidates her argument. And it must happen soon, or else that
will be read (and reinforced through Republican messaging) as she lacks
influence to get it moving (an admission she already has made tacitly in saying
“I will press hard for a vote in the coming weeks to build this pipeline”). Nor
would something like attaching the request to another bill, an idea
recently floated, serve as an alternative for campaign purposes, because then
she will have had nothing to do with it with such a rider skipping her
committee beyond being a floor vote for it, nothing special as would be pointed
out by her opposition.
And the argument can be expanded
further. Landrieu also has stated she
favors a push for permitting liquefied natural gas facilities for export of
the product where also the Obama Administration has dragged its heels; her
first committee hearing a month ago covered this subject. Cassidy and others
can ask where she seems to have any influence here, and point out that, beyond
issues of job creation in Louisiana and economic activity, that getting
these going as soon as possible also improves national security.
Obama continues
to put Landrieu in lose/lose situations, if not by her own fealty to his
issue preferences, then by his captivity to ideology and his intransigence to
the whims of out-of-state
billionaires destroying her campaign narrative of effectiveness in fighting
for the state. As she continues to carry unelectable poll numbers (most recently,
only 42 percent in a poll that sampled
20 percentage points greater than the actual the proportion of Obama voters in
2012), if she wants to get reelected she desperately needs some kind of
intervention to make Obama stop battering her. Bollinger's ad is unlikely to serve as her white knight.
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